Good Karma

by Christina Kelly

  “With a little wind, maybe.”

  “You’ll be fine.” Audrey pat his arm.

  At the very least, Catherine was impressed with Audrey’s multitasking—selling them a house, dismissing the wildlife, flirting with her husband. It reminded her of the topless central African women in National Geographic who weave baskets, collect honey, and raise children while their breasts sway in the heat.

  “But what are those guys doing?” Ralph asked. They watched a foursome drive their two carts to the edge of the fairway and into the rough, near the lagoon. One of the men got out, golf club in hand, and hurled it into the water.

  “Oh, that.” Audrey shook her head. “Little local tradition with the boys. If you’ve totally mucked up your score—you know, twenty above your handicap—you throw a club into the lagoon as sort of an offering to the golf gods. Must be a hundred rusting six irons in there. DEP hates it—really gets their hackles up—but there’s not much they can do.” Then she turned to Catherine. “It’s funny. You just never know what a man will do when he’s in a rut.”

  chapter 7

  Fred felt a particular sadness for the artificial tree in the corner of his grief counselor’s office. Its glossy leaves had been spray painted tractor green, and its trunk listed toward the window as if it were trying to get out. Chances were, the tree had been part of someone’s estate. Fred knew that some clients bequeathed everything to hospice, from spatulas and hair scarves to well-worn convertibles.

  Hunter had just asked him a question, but Fred had no idea what it had been. The man was half-smiling, waiting him out. In a game show there would have been a giant stopwatch ticking somewhere offstage. Hunter was a more expressive, younger version of himself. A version that had his hair cropped short, close to his head, and wore round glasses. A version that kept a plastic tree in the corner of his office where a live one might have worked a little better, considering the circumstances.

  “Pardon?” Fred asked.

  “I said, what does feeling stuck mean to you?”

  Feeling stuck. That’s what Fred had been stewing about. His life was not moving forward, or moving backward. Stalled on the shoulder of an expressway. Lissa was gone and he was all by himself. His few out-of-town friends had stopped calling regularly, and he was getting tired of taking every meal alone.

  He’d been surprised by the random things that people sent him after Lissa’s death—a box of tropical fruit, a sympathy basket of chocolate, several bottles of French wine. Even his dog park friends had chipped in together to purchase a wreath of red and white roses. When it arrived Fred mistook it momentarily for a lifeguard ring, as if he could strap his arms through it and be saved. It now lay in a grayish clump in the wooded area behind his house.

  “I don’t know. I feel . . .” He tried to come up with a synonym for stuck, but his mind didn’t work that way anymore. Years ago he could have tap-danced his way across any conversation—rattled off names of Supreme Court justices or debated the ethics of human cloning—but now he couldn’t come up with a synonym for stuck. “A fly to flypaper. All eight legs in glue.”

  Six legs. A fly has six legs, Lissa told him.

  “I mean six legs.”

  Hunter nodded, encouraging him. He had that look, his raised eyebrows saying, And?

  Under different circumstances, Fred might have invited Hunter to play golf at Seven Oaks, to try out the fast greens of Greenleaf Park or challenging bunkers at Palmetto Pines. They might have spent a pleasant afternoon discussing the advancement in putters or the direction of interest rates. But when Fred had first come in for counseling, he’d commented on the watercolor above Hunter’s desk, a large canvas of a wide fairway with a half-dollar green. A small red smudge indicated a distant flagstick. “Oh, I don’t play,” Hunter had replied when asked. “That picture’s just a metaphor for life.”

  The silence felt uncomfortable, so Fred tried again. “Unable to move on. Paralyzed, I guess.”

  Hunter nodded as if to say, Now we’re getting somewhere. “So tell me, were you able to get back on the course this week?”

  Fred laughed suddenly. A real laugh. A sound that came straight from his gut. The first laugh he hadn’t manufactured and pushed out of his abdomen in months.

  “Yes. I even shot a forty-eight.” He’d dragged himself out of the house before dusk two evenings ago and played the front nine alone. “It’s not worthy of an invitation to the Masters, but a personal achievement nonetheless.”

  Hunter nodded, encouraging him.

  “So I guess I’m not stuck in golf.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Maybe someday I’ll get back to my tennis, too.”

  “I think that’d be great for you.” Hunter hesitated. “And Danielle? Have you heard from her?”

  “She calls. Mostly to tell me about Tommy. Mostly to berate me for not checking my email. And she wants me to visit them at some point.”

  “And what do you want?”

  What did he want? To be more helpful in the only way he knew how. To sue his ex-son-in-law, the bastard who left his daughter. To fight for child support. “I want to help her, but she won’t let me.”

  “I see.”

  But how could Hunter see? No amount of Freudian training could prepare a man for understanding the complexities of fatherhood.

  “And Lissa’s dresses and jackets?” Hunter asked.

  “Coming along.” Hunter hadn’t taken any notes, but apparently he’d been listening. Fred wondered if his grief counselor raced to his computer to type up notes after their sessions. How had Hunter remembered Lissa’s clothes? Fred barely remembered them. “A box a week.” So what if he exaggerated a bit? What was the harm?

  “Really?”

  “I was able to get rid of some stuff.”

  Fred was going to say junk. I was able to get rid of some junk. Yet it wasn’t junk but souvenirs of clothes worn, meals eaten, a life well spent. Mementos from their wedding and their marriage and their past. Proof that they’d had a full journey. Stamped passports from European vacations, fancy stiff menus, and engraved party invitations.

  It’s trash, Lissa whispered. Just get it out of there.

  “Remember, being stuck can be temporary. Feelings aren’t facts,” Hunter said.

  Fred had been suspicious about the benefits of talk therapy. He felt it plausible that it could help, if only to spend time with someone else, but it wasn’t that different from what he did at the dog park. Sit there and talk to Ernie. Granted, they didn’t discuss Lissa, but still. Your dog is pooping. Stop digging. Did Lulu get groomed? It got him out of the house, at least. “So, what you’re saying is that maybe I’m not as stuck as I think.”

  Eureka! Lissa almost shouted. Give the man a door prize!

  With the tiniest speck of hope and Lissa pushing him, Fred got into his car. He must have taken his usual route home—left out of the parking lot and onto Eisenhower Drive, right on Waters, straight over the Intracoastal—but he had no particular memory of it. He usually considered stray litter on the causeway or the clumpy remains of roadkill, but he didn’t have a conscious thought until he reached the gates of Seven Oaks. That was quick, he thought as he drove under the raised security bar. In tennis it was called muscle memory, hitting a ball so cleanly off the strings without thinking or trying, action in perfect harmony with the universe.

  Sequoia must have heard the garage door opening, because when he entered she was there to greet him, her tail wagging. He leaned down and took her muzzle in his hand and kissed her on the forehead. He felt her breath on his face but didn’t linger. Before he could get stuck again, before any amount of second-guessing got in his way, he went to his office and clicked on the mouse so that his computer screen lit up.

  His daughter had set up an account for him a few weeks ago. She had sent him a letter with his password (Tommyturns9) and complete instructions for logging on to Facebook. Perhaps he could reconnect with college friends and stay in closer contact with Da
nielle and Tommy.

  He picked up the envelope from his desk, and out fell a small, square photo of Tommy. This time his grandson was in a coat and tie and looked like a miniature man. Tom Thumb posing in front of a piano. He was an attractive, amiable child, but how many pictures could his daughter take of one person? Danielle had recorded her son’s progress as if he were an endangered flower in a time-lapse photography experiment.

  Her note read:

  Dad: I’m sending you this the old-fashioned way so you can’t pretend you didn’t get it or didn’t know your password. Come join the 21st century . . . You don’t have to be alone. We miss you, xo D.

  Danielle worked part-time as a life coach, whatever that was.

  You know what it is. I’ve explained it to you a hundred times.

  I know what it is, but I don’t get it.

  You mean, why can’t people just coach themselves? Why can’t they just make decisions and lead unexamined lives? Why can’t they get through and done with their grief without going to a counselor? Why can’t they push on despite the loss of a loved one?

  Look at me. I’m going. It’s what you wanted.

  But you’re not listening.

  But he was listening, and to him it felt like Danielle never let Tommy out of her sight now that she was divorced and Tommy’s father had moved to Chicago. They took vacations together and ate dinners together, and watched movies together. She even played video games with him—badminton and table tennis and drag racing—swinging an invisible racket and pressing a pretend gas pedal. When Fred was employed and supporting his family, negotiations were in person, face-to-face, in corporate boardrooms across Middle America. Sometimes, even, he went overseas when a turbaned sheikh wanted to look him in the eye to discuss contract specifications for a G200. There was no such thing as a virtual meeting. You got to know someone by whether he ordered steak Diane or chicken Kiev at a business dinner, whether he drank martinis or Tom Collinses. It was a time when people actually talked to one another, not texted what was for dinner.

  Fred was getting used to the modern world, but didn’t trust technology. Didn’t trust what it did to people. What happened to opening a map and understanding the difference between north and south? What happened to looking outside to see if it was raining instead of going onto the World Wide Web and researching the weather? Even Tommy had been brainwashed by this new electronic age. On his and Lissa’s last trip to Maine, they’d given their grandson a Rubik’s Cube. The boy had taken it out of the box and sat staring at it, genuinely surprised. Finally he had turned to them, his puppy eyes wide: “But how do I turn it on?”

  And of course Danielle was feeling a loss from her mother’s death. How could she not? But Danielle had seemed angry with him since Lissa had gone, as if he’d been to blame for not saving her.

  That’s not it. You are reading too much into it. I’m going to make it right between you.

  Fred recognized that part of the problem was that Danielle didn’t have siblings with whom to share the responsibility of aging parents. As an only child, she was self-absorbed, a miniature country protected by a stone wall. And he and Lissa were partly to blame, as they’d shielded her from everything. Even when Danielle’s childhood dog, Gizmo, a beloved Bouvier des Flandres, had needed to be put to sleep, they’d told their daughter that he’d gone to live with a family in Nebraska. She’d actually believed it, never once even questioning his disappearance or asking to see a photograph of the lame dog in the prairie.

  Fred clicked the mouse again, but the screen read CHECK INTERNET CONNECTION. He touched a symbol in the upper-right corner and a box appeared: JOIN OTHER NETWORK; CREATE NETWORK; OPEN NETWORK PREFERENCES.

  Things get unstuck, she whispered. You know what to do. It’s not a crime to ask for help.

  Fred opened his desk drawer and pulled out the Seven Oaks residential directory, a sixty-page booklet that also offered general information about covenants and architectural-review guidelines. Four full pages addressed community no-nos. No recycling cardboard. No riding bicycles on golf cart paths. No keeping garage doors open overnight. He could look up the number of the main office or someone in the neighborhood to see if they’d lost their connection too.

  At one time he and Lissa knew all their neighbors. Once a month, couples on the street would converge at the common area for an evening meal, a picnic with scalloped potatoes and deep dishes of fried chicken. Someone might even bring a Frisbee or a portable radio. But as Fred ran through the names of people in the neighborhood to call, he realized they’d all moved away or died. The only couple he knew on his road were on a two-month South Pacific cruise. Fred used to not be able to get through the grocery store without an extended conversation in the condiment aisle with another Gulfstream associate or one of Lissa’s tennis partners. Now when he went, he might as well have been invisible.

  After the alphabetical listing came a directory by address. The houses on his street, owned by newly retired couples in a race for their lives to see the Grand Canyon or take a whistle-stop tour of the national park system, were dark at night. But he knew that his neighbor directly across the back woods was usually home. Whenever Fred couldn’t sleep, when he’d be sipping hot chocolate at his kitchen table at two a.m., he’d notice the faint burning lights in the nearby patio home on Oak Bluff Lane.

  He looked up the name associated with the address. Ida B. Childs.

  chapter 8

  Ida Blue wore an oversize black caftan with creamy pinstripes that ran the length of the fabric, from swoop collar to hem floating above thick ankles. She’d read that vertical stripes were slimming to a full-figured woman. And her new shade of Lady Danger lipstick would draw attention from her ample chin to her perfectly proportioned cheekbones. She’d even tied her waist-length chestnut hair into an elaborate chignon. Though she wasn’t going anywhere, was just at home watching Dr. Phil, she liked to keep up appearances.

  The phone rang just as Dr. Phil was doing an intervention with a man who was so obese that authorities needed to break through his walls and use a crane to rescue him. Dr. Phil, who looked like he might have put on a few pounds himself, was always doing that. Getting into other people’s business. Showing up on strangers’ doorsteps, rescuing them from whatever he deemed abnormal. Thank goodness I’m only big boned, she thought. He’d never get past security without a guest pass, anyway.

  The ringing phone startled her because she was surprised by the dulcet sound of a sitar, her custom tone for home calls. For a moment, she imagined that Ravi Shankar had sneaked into her living room as she watched Dr. Phil. She rarely got personal calls. Sometimes a pizza man would need turn-by-turn directions to her house as if she were an air traffic controller talking down a disabled plane. And once a Chinese delivery guy had gotten lost with her moo goo gai pan for what seemed like hours.

  She reached for the gentle sitar-strumming phone. “Hello?”

  “Hello, yes. This is your neighbor, Fred Wolfe.” The tingling in her toes started immediately, like the pins and needles one feels when a limb is awakening after an afternoon in a hammock. She was so overtaken by the unusual feeling, she forgot where she was. “What?”

  “Your neighbor, Fred Wolfe.”

  She felt as if someone were holding a heating pad to the balls of her feet, then her ankles. The warm sensation oozed up her calves and over her knees just as it’d felt when she’d been sucked into the green waters of the Okefenokee Swamp once while hunting. “Fred,” was all she could think to say.

  “Yes, Wolfe. W-o-l-f-e.”

  As he spoke, an out-of-focus screen seemed to roar to life in her backyard. She spied the gauzy outline of a slightly hunched woman with curly red hair wearing culottes, a golf shirt, and a visor. The muted apparition floated toward the tree-lined edge of her property.

  “Is this Ida Childs?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m on Jolly Badger Lane in Palmetto Pines. We share the same back woods.”

  Eve
ry time the man spoke, the ghostlike woman floating just above the lawn emerged in greater detail, like the work in progress of a color-by-number picture. The woman drifted toward the back porch while a heat lamp scorched Ida Blue’s thighs and abdomen.

  “Frrr-red.” She said his name slowly, letting it roll off her tongue Eliza Doolittle style, drawing the word into two syllables. “Frrr-red Wooo-lfe.”

  If she had been in a phone booth, this is when she would have plugged the coin slot with a fistful of quarters so as not to lose this connection. Her whole adult life she’d pretended to have a feeling of extrasensory insight, and here it was, landing on her back porch like a golden goose.

  She vaguely remembered seeing this woman walk an enormous dog with black spots around the neighborhood. “You have a Great Dane?” Ida Blue asked distractedly.

  “Yes, she’s mine. Everyone in the neighborhood seems to remember Sequoia.”

  She heard him fumbling with the receiver, maybe looking to see if they’d been disconnected.

  “Listen, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I think the Internet may be down in our neighborhood. I can’t get through to the cable company and the Seven Oaks office goes to voice mail.”

  With each word he spoke, the woman drifted nearer to Ida Blue’s window. If she’d been closer, Ida Blue imagined she could have reached out and taken her hand.

  Fred continued, “I’m not good with these computer contraptions. My wife used to handle these things.”

  The shimmery woman outside pointed to herself and threw her head back with amusement. “The woman with curly red hair? She played golf?”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’ve seen her around. We’ve lived here for years but she passed in September.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Ida Blue answered, trying to sound concerned but giddy with the magic of her newfound awareness. Like a piano student who, after years and years of stumbling through “Chopsticks,” can suddenly perform “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

  But as was so often the case, Ida Blue became distracted by her own thoughts. Her mind started to take her consciousness captive. As the woman’s outfit came into focus—culottes and green shirt—Ida started to slip away. The outline of the older woman floating outside started to dim. Ida snapped the rubber band on her wrist so hard it almost broke in two.